It's Baton Rouge: Out to Lunch

There’s a particular kind of business story that you can really only tell about Louisiana. It usually starts with somebody who barely had two nickels to rub together, an idea that almost nobody else took seriously, and a lot of stubbornness.

It almost never starts in a glass tower in a major metropolis. It starts in places like a front yard near LSU. Or in a small office somewhere on the way to the oil patch.

Both of my lunch...

How many companies do you think are involved in building a single house? Take a guess. Five? Ten? Maybe twenty?

Fifty-three.

On average, fifty-three different companies touch a single home before anyone moves in — foundation crews, electricians, plumbers, pest control, lighting specialists, insurers. 

Karen Profita represents all of them. She runs the Home Builders Association of Greater Baton Rouge, the largest homebuil...

In Hollywood, power couples from the 30s, 40s, and 50s, icons like  Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, and Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, exemplified glamour both on and off the screen. At the pinnacle of their careers, these romantic couples were closely followed and adored by movie-goers, capturing the public’s imagination during a Golden Age of film. 

Today, power couples are...

There’s a line I keep hearing from people who run small businesses in Baton Rouge. It goes something like: I didn’t plan this. I was doing something else, I saw a gap, and I walked through it.

Norisha Kirts Glover has a degree in mass communication and an MPA. She spent years in nonprofit fundraising in Washington, D.C. and California. In 2015 she walked through a door marked “commercial construction” &mdash...

Think about the last time you showed your ID. Maybe at the airport, maybe at a bar, maybe somewhere you had to prove you were who you said you were. You pulled out a card. A piece of plastic. Maybe it was a little beat up. Maybe the photo was from ten years ago.

There’s a decent chance that if you live in Louisiana, you’ve also used a phone to do that. That digital driver’s license on your phone — that was b...

I’m Amy Irvin, host of Out to Lunch in Baton Rouge. I was a college student once. A long time ago. And like a lot of college students, I picked some of my classes based on the professor. Word of mouth, mostly. What my friends said. Whether the 8 a.m. course section was worth getting out of bed for or not.

These days, there’s a website that tries to do that systematically. You’ve probably heard of it. Rate My Profe...

Think about the last time you visited a city you’d never been to before. Not for business — just to go. What made you decide to stay somewhere? What made you feel like the place wanted you there?

Most of the time, we don’t give a lot of credit to the people who set that stage. The campground owner who keeps a shuttle running at midnight so you can get back safely from the French Quarter. The art curator who figure...

Today’s edition of Out to Lunch sits at the intersection of two big ideas: immersion and reach.  One guest is building virtual worlds for the world’s largest energy companies and the U.S. Air Force — right here in Baton Rouge. The other is shaping how millions of people around the globe experience the NFL — from a home office in Baton Rouge. 

Both guests grew up in Louisiana, both left, both came b...

A little wartime history: In 1940, at the start of World War II, approximately 12 million women were working outside the household in the United States, comprising about 25% of the female population. That number rose significantly during the war to over 18 million by 1945, as the U.S. government encouraged women in posters and commercial advertising to volunteer for wartime service in factories. Inspired by a song by Redd Evans and...

If you listen to this show you’ve heard at the end of every episode the credits “today’s show was engineered by J T O’Neal” and “photos were taken by Ian Ledo and Miranda Albarez.” But do you know what that actually means? What is an audio engineer? What do photographers actually do that’s different from what you do with your phone?

On today's Out to Lunch we turn the mics on our prod...

The disco era of the Seventies is characterized by a danceable "four-on-the-floor" beat, lush orchestration, synthesizers, and glamorous fashion, ultimately exploding into mainstream pop culture with hits, iconic clubs like Studio 54, and films like Saturday Night Fever, before fading by 1980.

Filmed in 1977, Saturday Night Fever was a critical and commercial success, helping to popularize disco around the world. The soundtrack, fe...

Louisiana cuisine is famous for its bold, flavorful dishes like gumbo, jambalaya, and crawfish étouffée. Stemming from rich French, Spanish, African, and Native American influences, our world famous fare is illuminated primarily through Cajun and Creole traditions, using local seafood, smoked meats, rice, and spices for iconic meals.

Take my favorite Louisiana dish, gumbo, for instance. There are certain ingredients, ...

Each year, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office grants hundreds of thousands of patents to people who embody what we sometimes refer to as “American ingenuity”. These are folks who are creative problem-solvers, capable of out-of-the box thinking that leads to innovation.  

From Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs, American ingenuity has resulted in a host of innovations and inventions that most of us now take for gran...

Recent brides and their fathers who paid for the wedding won’t be surprised to learn that the average cost of a wedding in the U.S. is between $30,000 and $36,000, depending on the couple's choices, incuding the wedding location and number of guests.

One of the major costs of any wedding is photography.

In an image-driven society where pics of the most mundane activities are posted online for public consumption, capturing the...

There are a lot of things to plan for when moving to a new city: renting a UHaul, forwarding personal mail, driving the most efficient route to a new job. But few people plan for or even consider what perhaps is the most important aspect to a successful transition to a new city: making friends.

Making new friends is hard in any city but especially so in small towns and cities where friends have known each other since grade school, ...

Would you be surprised to learn that the top five degrees in demand in the US are in healthcare, technology, engineering, business, and mathematics? Probably not. 

But as AI is introduced into nearly every facet of the workplace, college admission managers and HR directors are increasingly pointing to the importance of soft skills, the personal attributes and interpersonal abilities that define how you interact with others in ...

Imagine if you had a few thousand dollars to spend however you wanted? What would you do? A few of my friends might put a down payment on a house. Others would take a long-dreamed about vacation. Or buy an expensive piece of art.  Most would give some money to their favorite charity. 

Yes, Americans certainly are generous with their money. In 2023, individuals gave $374 billion dollars, representing 67% of total giving, a...

You've probably heard that public radio currently exists in an environment of less than zero public funding. "Less than zero" because when the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was disbanded, monies that had already been promised to public radio stations like WRKF were clawed back.

Today, the only reason you're able to hear this conversation on Out to Lunch is because of the the actions of good corporate citizens who have stepped...

In years past, formal dining rooms were used for Sunday dinner or holiday get-togethers, opportunities to cook a traditional meal, served on fine china, leisurely eaten among family or friends over a glass of wine.

Today, estate sales are jam-packed with barely-used china no one wants because in most modern households meals are often fast-food or grabbed from the to-go counter and holiday meals are often catered and sometimes serve...